All of us literary nerds are familiar with the name, “Virginia Woolf.” We have also heard that we are supposed to fear her, and not simply because of her name, but because of her tenacity to stand up against the patriarchal mind, and also the mental paradigms of her own time.

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th century authors and also a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.

Here are the six best quotes we could muster:

1. ‘Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.’
2. “When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?”
3. “Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
4. “I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me.”
5. “I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
6. “In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to details around us.”
7. “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”